Date post: | 16-Jul-2015 |
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Data & Analytics |
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Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
DOING AN AWESOME SITE AUDIT
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Closet web developer & Wordpress fanatic
Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson
Technical SEO + analytics geek
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Technical SEO is
hugely important
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
...yet consistently terrible
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Fixing things is often big and complex
(technically and politically)
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The ‘Site Audit’ is a process for identification and prioritisation of issues
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Most SEO audits suck
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
audit graveyard
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Nobody wants an audit.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Your responsibility is to make things happen
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The Process
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Anticipate objections
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Think about who you’re talking to
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Consider that you have multiple audiences with
different needs
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Know your audience
● C-Level
● Management*
● Marketing
● Tech
● Finance
● Legal
● Third parties
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Know your audience
● If any one of these groups has any objections, you enter the spiral of doom
● People will anticipate other people’s objections (good neighbor syndrome) and/or find reasons to defer
● Success depends upon perfect, unquestioned, immediate consensus
● "We’ll just need to run it past..." sounds like progress, but it’s is the spiral of doom
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Know your audience
● You need multiple flavours of deliverables to tackle this
1) Some quick wins*
2) A long-form, editorial audit
3) A spreadsheet of itemised, prioritised issues
4) Cheat sheets for each individual issue
5) A storyboard style presentation
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
You will need...
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
You will need...
● Exhaustive keyword & market research
● Performance and/or commercial data
● To challenge conventional thinking on what an audit looks like, and how long it takes*
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Long-form editorial
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Long-form editorial
Required to get senior buy-in and backup to overrule other objections.
● Compellingly model commercial impact/opportunity
● Communicate using their language
● Instill fear and/or greed
● Demonstrate capability
● Identify and outline issues
● Manage the politics
● Differentiate between commercial impact and commercial opportunity
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Long-form editorial
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Cheat sheet
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Summarise the issue.
Two A4 sheets, size 10 font. No more, no less. 20 minutes per sheet. Standardisation is important.
Cheat sheet
● Overview of issue● Summary● Impact (with metrics)● Absolute priority score● Date completed & impact● Other areas (of organisational
or resource) impact
● User story● Brief for fix*● Benefits from fixing (with affected metrics)● Implications of not fixing (as above)● Possible risks● On-going maintenance or process reqs
Business World Tech World
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Itemised issues
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Itemised issues
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Storyboard
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Storyboard
Name of issue
What is this: Lorem ipsum dolar sum
So what: Lorem ipsum dolar sum
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Quick wins
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Quick wins
● Use the ‘Cheat Sheet’ format
● Focus exclusively on simple, binary issues
● Pick on symptoms if you need to
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
audit graveyard
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The audit(!)Brief tips
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Move slowly!
cook it slowly
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The audit
● Focus on the cause, not the symptom.
○ Don’t focus on missing tags, broken redirects, etc. Find the why.
○ Group things by the why, and use the symptoms for reference + justification
○ Separate isolated/misc issue into line items in your line-items doc
● Chase the money (and time is money, too).
○ 1,000 hours of work on a broken blog subdomain, or 10 hours of work on an ecommerce template?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The audit
● Typically, the first cut focuses almost exclusively on indexation and/or error control.
○ Until this is (at least partially) tackled, it’s hard to diagnose anything else.
○ Manage people’s expectations around this
● Start with Google before you break out the tools
○ site: searches
○ inurl: (or -inurl:)
○ filetype: (xml, html, swf)
○ (URL Profiler does some cool duplication stuff)
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Eyeball for patterns v.s. issues● Discerning root cause:
○ Template level? Where is the problem?
○ Page/URL level? What type of thing is it?
○ Front end or back end (or other)?What kind of skill set is needed?
● Separating opportunity from issue, and fact from opinion
● Collect and sort issues as you go; iterate the documentation
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Break out the tools
● Use these to validate, quantify, and to strip back layers of the onion
● Don’t be afraid to go broad; include user testing, heat-mapping, crawls - reinforce the points you’re already making
● New/extra issues can expand on existing ones, or be woven into the story
● Piggyback on other people’s learnings and processes, e.g., the Moz 2015 checklist.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
(!)
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson